5 ways to customize your sewing experience

Yesterday on QUILTsocial I showed you 6 steps to setting up the main sewing machine part of THE Dream Machine 2 from Brother. Today I’m going to show you just a few of the MANY ways you can customize your sewing experience with THE Dream Machine 2.

THE Dream Machine 2

As I said yesterday, when you turn on the machine, an opening video and music plays. This will continue until you touch the touch screen.

Next, the home screen will appear on the LCD screen of THE Dream Machine 2. From here you can access any of the screens to control the many functions of the machine. I’m going to touch the “settings” icon which is the second icon from the left on the top of the screen – it looks like a piece of paper.

The home screen

The settings pages

When the settings icon is touched, page 1 of the 9 setting pages will appear. You can scroll through these nine pages by touching the forward and back arrows at the bottom of the page. As you can see, there are MANY options for changing the settings of the machine. I’m going to focus on the five settings that I decide to change right from the beginning, but this is by no means the only customization you can make!

Settings page 1

1. Customize the foot pedal

The multi function foot controller for THE Dream Machine 2 can be customized to do any combination of five different functions. Like any other sewing machine, the main foot controller, controls start/stop and speed. But on this machine you can set what the heel switch and side pedal do. The options you can choose from include thread cutting, needle UP/DOWN, single stitch and reverse stitch. I decided to set the heel switch to reverse and the side pedal to thread cutting. Now I just have to remember that I can use my foot for these actions!

Settings for the multi function foot controller

2. Set the screen saver and opening screen

The opening movie is very fun, but you may decide that you would rather have the machine turn on and go right to the home screen. Also, if you step away from your machine, you may want a screen saver to play on the LCD screen after a certain length of time. These can be set on this settings screen.

One of the settings screens

3. Adjusting volume and brightness

On THE Dream Machine 2’s 4th settings screen you can adjust the volume of the machine’s speakers (for videos and button beeps) and change the brightness of the LCD screen and LCD lights shining on the bed of the machine. I set my volume to low (1) and the brightness of the LCD touch screen to medium (3). I love how I can also change the brightness of the LCD lights shining on the work surface – I set them to high (5).

The fourth settings screen

4. Changing to ECO mode

I have a tendency to multitask and as a result will often walk away from my machine intending to come back, only to find that my machine is still ‘on’ hours later! To save power when you step away from THE Dream Machine 2, you can set ECO mode to ‘on’ and set how long the machine will wait before going into sleep mode. Once it enters sleep mode, you “wake it” back up by touching the touch screen. That’s it!

Turning on ECO mode

5. Width vs speed control

The speed control slider on THE Dream Machine 2 can be changed into a width control just by going into the settings screen. I can see this being VERY useful when doing machine applique using all those decorative stitches!!

Width control vs speed control

As you can see, customizing this machine is very easy and the ways in which you can make it your own are limitless! I’ve got a couple important projects that I’m working on for Northcott this week, so I’m excited to get sewing with this machine!

Tomorrow I’m going to show you how great THE Dream Machine 2 is for piecing and then later this week we’ll do a little free motion quilting – see you tomorrow!

I have been designing and publishing quilt patterns for the last 16 years under the business name Fairfield Road Designs. My patterns range from fusible applique and piecing to felted wool applique and punchneedle. You can see all of patterns on my website www.fairfieldroaddesigns.com.